1. Technical Field
One or more embodiments disclosed herein relate generally to a social networking system. More specifically, one or more embodiments disclosed herein relate to sharing videos over a social networking system.
2. Background and Relevant Art
Online video watching is an increasingly popular pastime among Internet users. For example, users frequently go online to watch movies, TV episodes, news and weather reports, and other types of video clips. Thus, users can watch video online via web-enabled televisions, smart phones, tablets, smart wearables, etc.
As watching videos online becomes more popular, it has also become increasingly common for users to share videos via a social networking system. For instance, in response to watching a humorous video online, a social networking system user may wish to bring the humorous video to the attention of friends, family members, and/or acquaintances. Accordingly, social networking systems typically provide one or more mechanisms by which the user can share the humorous video with other social networking system users who are associated with the user (e.g., “friends”). For example, in response to the user selecting an option to share a video, the social networking system can add a link or video player control to the newsfeeds of the user's friends, such that the user's friends can view the video as well.
When sharing videos via a social networking system, however, users typically encounter various problems. For example, a video sharer may only want to share a particular portion or segment of a video with his social networking system friends, rather than having them watch the entire video. In order to point out only a portion of a video, the video sharer typically adds instructions to the video (e.g., via a comment or tag) that state a timestamp within the video where other users should begin watching the video (e.g., “Hey, the funny part starts at about 2 minutes in!”). Thus, in order to watch the indicated portion, the video sharer's friends must scroll through the video to the right timestamp. This extra hassle frequently deters the video sharer's friends from watching the video at all.
In some cases, a video sharer may attempt to edit the video in order to extract only a portion of the video to share via a social networking system. This approach is also problematic for various reasons. For example, video-editing software is typically expensive and requires a large amount of resources to run successfully. Additionally, editing videos may run the video sharer afoul of various copyright standards.
Further problems arise with regard to “viral” videos. For example, a viral video is one that has become extremely popular and is frequently viewed by Internet users. A social networking system user may wish to share a popular video that has become viral with his friends via a social networking system, when only a portion of the viral video is truly what watchers are interested in seeing. When the user's social networking friends watch the viral video, they generally have no indication of what portion of the video that has made the video popular enough to become viral. Thus, the user's social networking friends typically watch the entire video when only a portion of the video is the reason the video has become viral, which is a waste of time. Alternatively, the user's social networking friends may skip the video altogether.
Thus, there are several disadvantages to current methods for sharing videos via a social networking system.